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Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives - encompassing values, knowledges, and needs - and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts.

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ABSTRACT. Understanding how social-ecological systems are and can be resilient to climate change is one of the world's most crucial problems today. It requires knowledge at local and global scales, the integration of natural and social sciences, and a focus on biocultural diversity. Small Pacific Islands and the knowledge-practice-belief systems of their peoples have a long history of resilience to environmental variability and unpredictability, including in areas with marginal habitats and with periodic, severe disturbance (e.g., drought, flood, storms, and tsunami). We review the state of research on these knowledge systems as it pertains to resilience and adaptation, and we highlight critical research needs to address the interrelated areas of: (1) local-scale expertise and observations of change with regard to weather, life-history cycles, and ecological processes; (2) customary resource management institutions and practices (i.e., with agroforests and the nearshore marine environment); and (3) the roles of leaders, social institutions, and social networks in the context of disturbance and change. We conclude that these knowledge systems can contribute high-resolution observations, benchmark data, and insights into practices that enhance resilience and adaptive capacity in integrated terrestrial and marine systems. Community-based and participatory approaches can complement and ground-truth climate models and direct culturally appropriate resource management, research, and adaptation measures. Although most islands in the Pacific are small, their knowledge systems include valuable insights on seasonal cycles, ecological processes, and the management of biocultural diversity that are relevant at a broad scale for understanding resilience and adaptability to the social-ecological effects of climate change.

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Abstract:Resilience theory has received increased attention from researchers across a range of disciplines who have developed frameworks and articulated categories of indicators; however, there has been less discussion of how to recognize, and therefore support, social resilience at the community level, especially in urban areas. The value of urban environmental stewardship for supporting social-ecological functioning and improving quality of life in cities has been documented, but recognizing it as a strategy for strengthening social resilience to respond to future disturbances has not been fully explored. Here we address the question: How can social resilience indicators be operationalized as stewardship practices in an urban context? Using a deductive coding approach drawing upon existing resilience frameworks we analyze qualitative data from community managed-open spaces in the New York City area that have responded to various chronic presses and acute disturbances including a hurricane and a terrorist attack. In each case we identify and characterize the type of grounded, empirically observable stewardship practices that demonstrate the following indicators of social resilience at the community level: place attachment, social cohesion, social networks, and knowledge exchange and diversification. The process of operationalizing abstract indicators of social resilience has important implications for managers to support social (and ecological) resilience in the specific areas where stewardship takes place, as well as potentially having greater effects that bridge beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries of the site. We conclude by suggesting how researchers and practitioners might learn from our examples so they can recognize resilience in other sites in order to both inform research frameworks and strengthen practice and programming, while keeping larger institutional structures and context in mind.

Executive SummaryWho volunteers to steward the urban forest in New York City and how do volunteer stewards get involved in these activities? This is the second paper in a series that focuses on the social and organizational dynamics of urban environmental stewardship. This paper presents results from research on volunteer stewards at MillionTreesNYC tree planting events in spring and fall 2010, which were sponsored by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and the New York Restoration Project, a non-profit organization focused on enhancing underused green spaces throughout NYC. Although recent academic and policy studies have focused on the increasingly wide range of organizations working as stewards to conserve, manage, monitor, advocate for, or educate the public about the local environment, it remains unclear how individual citizens get involved in local stewardship initiatives. Such knowledge is needed by professionals working to manage environmental stewardship programs and by anyone seeking to understand better how the human infrastructure of environmental stewardship is established, maintained, and improved.For this study, we surveyed a random sample of adult volunteers who participated in the spring and fall 2010 MillionTreesNYC planting events in parks throughout New York City. The volunteers planted trees and mulched wooded areas during morning and early afternoon hours. The survey included questions about where the volunteers came from to participate, how they heard about the event, with whom they came to the event, what prior connections they had with local environmental stewardship organizations, and their levels of civic/political engagement prior to the event. DemographicsOver half of the respondents of the study were women and most were relatively young (the median age was 30). Volunteer stewards tended to be white and well educated. In comparison to the New York City population as a whole, our sample population contains a greater percentage of whites, females, and highly educated people. These differences held across the spring and fall sample populations and are consistent with national trends in voluntarism. Politics and Civic EngagementPolitically, volunteer stewards tend to be more liberal than the American population. Volunteer stewards reported being engaged in all types of civic and political activities, from voting in an election to signing a petition. In most cases, the volunteer stewards were significantly more engaged in civic and political activities than the American population. This trend held for both the spring and fall sample populations. CSE White Paper I 3 Environmental StewardshipAlthough the majority of the volunteers at the MillionTreesNYC planting events were relatively inexperienced at environmental stewardship activities, roughly one-fifth of them demonstrated a high degree of prior engagement. These experienced volunteers had been to previous tree plantings, were members of local stewardship organizations, and took care of trees at other sites. They showed...